Most Hong Kong local businesses may not go deep enough when they are first starting to take care of search engine optimization of their company websites. Improvement in site speed, implementation of security (i.e. SSL), making it easy for the site to be crawled, and getting rid of broken links (or 404 errors) may be regarded the advanced SEO stuffs.
But an experienced Hong Kong SEO agency will always tell you that they are the exact elements that you will need to implement correctly or fix (when they are already implemented wrong). They are the SEO basics that when you have mistakenly or deliberately ignored, you would have regret.
There have been examples in which when you have completely ignored these basics, the whole online marketing effort of the business goes horribly wrong. The business website has suffered from losing over 90% of organic search traffic that it could have received had it have properly implemented all the above mentioned SEO basics. It can also happen to your company website where it targets mainly the Hong Kong audience.
In terms of a site’s speed, for an additional second it takes to load your web page, the conversion rate of your website would go down accordingly. For example, if you mainly target the Hong Kong market, why not consider hosting your site on a HK locally based server or cloud service? To make it worse, Google has already announced a couple of years ago that site speed is one of the organic search ranking factors. To add to it, Google has been making use of mobile first indexing when ranking websites. This means for any site, Google would analyze the pages first as if they are pages only for mobile devices/users.
This is probably very basic stuff. But in today’s internet and mobile era, there are still many traditional businesses’ websites haven’t even made it simple enough for Google (or any other search engines) to crawl (or discover) their pages. The businesses would have gone ahead to produce and publish an entire set of industry whitepaper on pages that are very suitable for their target Hong Kong users, but unfortunately are sitting very deep inside their websites. This is problem. One alternative even though it is not a 100% ideal solution to resolve all the issues is to submit a sitemap to Google.
We often assume Google’s spider move freely between all the pages on your website. But firstly you aren’t sure about whether it is true. Secondly, when your site has some broken links hiding in it, it doesn’t help Google to give your site a good score. Using a professional crawler tool to spider your entire site may seem a very complicated setup for many business owners, though when it is correctly done it is very useful to eliminate the 404 error issues. The next best option is to make use of the broken link reports in Google Search Console.